Paradigm Research Group

The Paradigm Research Group (PRG) is a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization founded by Stephen Bassett in 1996 to lobby the United States federal government for official acknowledgment of an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race — a process Bassett terms the "Truth Embargo" and its ending as "Disclosure." PRG has been identified as the only registered lobbying entity in the United States whose stated purpose is ET disclosure.

Founding and Mission

Stephen Bassett established the Paradigm Research Group following the 1995 publication of what he describes as his political awakening to the UFO cover-up — the systematic suppression of evidence of non-human intelligent contact by agencies of the U.S. government. PRG operates on the premise that the evidence for an extraterrestrial presence is conclusive, that its suppression is politically motivated, and that ending the cover-up requires the same political pressure applied to any legislative or executive priority in Washington.

Bassett distinguished PRG's approach from civilian UFOlogy research organizations by deliberately framing its activities in the language and practice of political lobbying: registered advocacy, congressional testimony, and coordinated political pressure campaigns targeting elected officials and media institutions. He registered as a lobbyist under the Lobbying Disclosure Act — an unusual step for a UFO-focused organization — and has maintained that registration through multiple electoral cycles, providing PRG with legal standing to directly petition elected officials on behalf of its cause. Bassett coined the term "Truth Embargo" to describe the political decision — as distinct from a merely administrative or scientific one — to suppress ET contact evidence, and positioned Disclosure as a constitutional and democratic imperative rather than a scientific question.

Bassett's framing was adopted early by both Michael Salla and Paola Harris, two of the foundational figures of the exopolitics movement, who embraced "exopolitics" as the political-science equivalent of the term "ufology."

Citizen Hearing on Disclosure

Main article:

Citizen Hearing on Disclosure

In April–May 2013, PRG organized the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in which forty researchers, military officers, government officials, and witnesses presented testimony on the UFO phenomenon to a panel of six retired members of the U.S. Congress. The event ran for five days and was modeled explicitly on formal congressional hearings. Richard Dolan, who participated as a witness and noted the hearing's impact on the broader public through online video distribution, described the event as part of a cultural shift in the UFO debate.

The six retired Congressional panelists who agreed to serve at the Citizen Hearing were paid a consulting fee in lieu of the official salaries they would have received as active committee members, and were drawn from both parties. Each witnessed five full days of testimony and cross-examination — a duration that exceeded most actual congressional hearings on any single subject. The witnesses presenting testimony included Steven Greer (founder of the Disclosure Project), former NORAD officer Stanley Fulham, researchers from multiple countries, and military and intelligence community veterans. The proceedings were simultaneously live-streamed and subsequently broadcast on pay-per-view television. PRG paid each of the six former members about $20,000 plus expenses, and the panel heard roughly 30 hours of testimony between April 29 and May 3, 2013.

Dolan identified the Citizen Hearing as a significant inflection point in public engagement: the high production values, professional tone, and accessibility of the YouTube-distributed video reached an audience that would not have sought out conventional UFO conference material, introducing a younger generation to serious disclosure advocacy in a format that matched their media consumption patterns.

Political Lobbying Activities

PRG has formally lobbied members of Congress for hearings on UAP and ET disclosure since the early 2000s, maintaining a presence at the National Press Club and issuing regular press releases and political action campaigns. Bassett coined the political framing of the "Truth Embargo" to describe the governmental suppression of ET contact evidence, positioning disclosure not as a scientific question but as a political and constitutional one — one requiring elected representatives to act.

PRG has tracked and commented on every significant development in U.S. government UAP policy, including the creation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the 2017 New York Times AATIP revelations, and the 2023 House Oversight Committee hearings featuring David Grusch, Ryan Graves, and David Fravor. Bassett was also an early supporter of the term exopolitics, which entered wider use through the work of researchers including Michael Salla and Paola Harris.

PRG's analytical framework: the Truth Embargo

Bassett's foundational analytical contribution is the concept of the Truth Embargo — a term deliberately chosen to frame ET suppression as a political act with a start date, decision-makers, and political consequences, rather than as an administrative policy or a security classification judgment. Bassett dates the Truth Embargo to roughly 1947, the year of the 1947 Roswell incident and President Truman's creation of the National Security Act infrastructure — the organizational framework within which, Bassett argues, the ET management program was embedded outside normal congressional oversight. He argues that ending the Truth Embargo requires political rather than scientific action: congressional hearings, executive orders, and the political will of elected leaders to override whatever institutional resistance the classified programs represent.

This framing distinguishes PRG from organizations like the Disclosure Project (which focuses on witness testimony) or MUFON (which focuses on field investigation) by treating disclosure primarily as a political outcome to be achieved through legislative and executive processes rather than a scientific or evidential question to be resolved through research.

Bassett's congressional testimony (2013)

At the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in 2013, Bassett personally introduced a classified-witness video before the panel of former legislators, emphasizing that the witness had received direct government threats — including threats to his family — yet wished his testimony to be presented. Bassett framed the event as evidence of the human cost of the Truth Embargo: "What you see in this video is the intersection of the human aspect of the truth embargo and the policy of the truth embargo. There are consequences, people are affected." At the same hearing, Richard Dolan described the wider significance of the Truth Embargo in structural terms — noting that America's major media had lost independence to the military-industrial complex, and that the UFO subject was suppressed for political and economic reasons including the threat disclosure would pose to the petroleum-based global financial system.

Post-2017 activities

Following the December 2017 New York Times article revealing the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and the public emergence of the To The Stars Academy, PRG continued to advocate for formal congressional hearings, which Bassett had long identified as the most likely vehicle for formal acknowledgment. The 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing — at which David Grusch testified under oath about a U.S. government UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program — was identified by PRG as the closest the U.S. government had come to satisfying the conditions for the end of the Truth Embargo. Bassett subsequently assessed that formal Disclosure — defined as a sitting U.S. president acknowledging that UAPs are ET vehicles — remained the ultimate goal and had not yet been achieved.

See also

• Citizen Hearing on Disclosure
• Exopolitics Institute

References

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